Rare Endangered
7 hours ago
I was frustrated to the point of tears by the local and national media's shameful, abhorrent coverage of the death of Sean Taylor, especially in the immediate aftermath, when Taylor was presented to the public as an agent of his own demise, apparently by virtue of the fact that he was a young black man who went to the University of Miami and once hit guys hard on a football field. And Wilbon's position was the worst of the worst: he had no information, yet was perfectly comfortable assembling this narrative when, in fact, Taylor had been murdered in his bedroom in a mostly random home invasion. Wilbon presented that narrative to ESPN's national audience as a propped-up DC "insider" and to this day the nature of Sean Taylor's death is still tainted by that falsehood. The poor guy died defending his family in his own home, and no one outside of Chick Hernandez and Ken Harvey had the compassion or integrity to reject that reckless, utterly fabricated Sean-Taylor-as-bad-guy narrative in favor of empathy.
And Wilbon's been doing this shyt forever. He's one of sports journalism's very worst ready-made-template thumpers, which is how he got his gig at ESPN - he's perfectly willing to take any particular sports story and torture it into a cheap, homogenized, connect-the-dots narrative, and he does it with enough carefully timed tough-talk to trick everyone into thinking he's taking a sharp line. He keeps these angles tucked into his shirt sleeve: called out for celebrity hobnobbing? It was charity. Dan Steinberg hates charity! Look everyone, Dan Steinberg is a charity-hater-guy! Professional politicians are less sleazy than this.
So, in short, Michael Wilbon is a nasty blowhard sack of shyt without a shred of personal or professional integrity, and his representation of the DC area, like everything else he ever writes, should be treated as the blind-fire ejaculate of his imagination that it genuinely is.
... but y'all swear you're a sports town?
